Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Happy Birthday Murray Rothbard

Murray Rothbard, who left us much too soon, would have been 85 today. Mises died just before Hayek won the Nobel Prize, and Murray died on the cusp of a renaissance of Austrian economics. If only he could have seen all these great developments — the Austrian Scholars Conference, the Internet, the wild success of LRC and Mises.org, the rising generation of bright young Austrians, the Ron Paul phenomenon, and much else. And indeed we can hardly imagine the thunderous cheers he would have received from the hundreds and thousands of young (and old) libertarians who, having first heard of him over the past few years, would have come to see him. Although he never abandoned his traditional typewriter I feel confident we could have forced him onto the Internet, once he realized its potential. And what a foe of the neocons he would have been.

But he left us much more in terms of books, original thought, and inspiration than we have a right to expect from any individual, and that’s our consolation.